Joel , in his inimitable way, posted the flame bait of all flame bait posts yesterday , explaining the role of the Duct Tape Programmer. To my surprise, the Twitterverse started to reverberate with commentary, but weirdly, almost all of it was very negative...

I'm currently looking at a code base that could do with some refactoring, overall it's a pretty good code base, and the test coverage is pretty good too. But looking through it gave me some ideas on what makes a code base tricky to safely refactor...